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Comment by confoundcofound | Hacker News Reader

You shouldn't be downvoted.

I don't know if it's willful ignorance or what, but most people can't grok the fact that children do not develop in a vacuum. They are in most cases a reflection of their parents' traits and values. Worse for SBF, it is entirely plausible that they had a direct hand in enabling his fraudulent behavior. They were politically-connected Stanford lawyers. It would be foolish to dismiss the possibility of them opening doors and providing cover for their son.

Perhaps an extreme comparison, but I feel the same exact way about adolescent school shooters. We are so quick to absolve and sanctify the parents as if their child's violent tendencies emerged suddenly and spontaneously.

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His father having some level of involvement in FTX is indisputable, as he was a consultant to FTX. His mother's PAC also received a significant amount of funding from it, which certainly raises questions.

As far as nature vs nurture, consider this navel gazing 2013 essay by his mother ( https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blam... ) essentially arguing that criminal culpability is impossible because free will doesn't exist.

>>*arguing that criminal culpability is impossible because free will doesn't exist.*

OK - WTF?

There is a lot of discussion about 'free will' - however, thats around predestination, blah blah -

But to state that '*criminality*' doesnt exist DUE to predetermination is psycho bot BS.

Some people more educated in philosophy or logic or whatever that I may be --- EXPLAIN THIS??

To paraphrase the old TV commercials.

"This is your mind on postmodern thinking. Any questions?"

Just like mate selection in peacocks created elaborate pointless plumage, competition among scholars in fields with inadequate connection to reality allow divergence off into absurd lines of thought which have their own elegant internal consistency but no external purpose. They could just be considered art or entertainment, except for the risk of causing grave harm when someone mistakenly uses them to justify policy without evaluating their consistency with reality or legible human values.

See also the recent HN thread on kritiks in high school debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36920566

Interesting that the article misscharacterized Nozick as right wing, completely missing the history of rejection of libertarians by both right and left parties and the continued outreach by libertarians to both.

I don't know enough about this to even comment...

Is it of value for you to link to something important? Lacking information on this.

Thanks

A good place to start would be with this text on Rothbard’s leftism, which connects ideas you may already familiar regarding libertarianism with leftism: https://cdn.mises.org/19_1_2.pdf

However the roots go much deeper. Nozick himself was advancing the progressive tradition. One way to understand it is to start by considering how the state was the tool leftist had used through the 19th century to advance individual human rights. Once the state had become totalizing in the way all modern capitalist countries are today, the only way forward to advance human rights further must involve the dissolution of the state since oppression is no longer caused by traditional social mores but rather by the system that replaced those. That’s why you often see weird alliances between rightists and libertarians: the few remnants of reactionary resistance against the state allied with what is at core a radical progressive movement. Leftists are a more natural ally with libertarians but cannot support libertarians as leftist power flows from state authority.

There’s also a more specific history of libertarian plus leftist conference and other collaborations but I’m not knowledgeable on the details, merely that the info is there if you search for it.

While Nozick was not traditionally right-wing, he was arguing for a pretty minimal state that’s not compatible with left, liberal, progressive ideas.

Minimal state is absolutely compatible with leftist philosophy! Anarchism itself is a leftist movement. What’s incompatible isn’t ideology, its praxis. Mainstream leftist movements rely on state power to further their goals. That said there’s still a ton of great leftist movements today that attempt to sidestep statism.

To be (sadly) honest this is exactly what I was thinking when I wrote the comment at the top, but suspected it would have been buried for being so direct. It is gratifying to see some people here with guts to say what they think.

As a society we have now a possibly exaggerated tendency to ascribe any positive contributions by an individual to their environmental circumstances (this is definitely more true where I am in Canada, but it is becoming more true over time in the US), while we have a tendency to assume all the bad things can be blamed on a single leader to absolve everyone else of all responsibility for their supporting roles. A slight correction is in order imo.

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